Category Archives: Technology

International Space Station May Be Dumped Into the Ocean by U.S. Congress

by Editor

The International Space Station which has taken 11 years and $44 billion to finally bring to a state of completion may be scuttled when its funding runs out in 2015. How about that? One of the greatest achievements in human history – greater than the building of the pyramids – may be dumped into the ocean before it can perform its intended mission which is scientific research and experimentation outside of the Earth’s gravity.

So we elect a man to the presidency twice over who is on the intellectual level of a monkey and give him $80 billion every few months so that he can arbitrarily slaughter the boys and girls of the people who elected him by sending them into a needless Iraqi hell on earth without adequate protection. But we can’t keep the greatest machine ever built by a human hand orbiting the planet? Someone simply must be kidding. I refuse to accept this as a possibility. There’s death money and there’s life money.  Iraq war money is death money and sets human civilization back.  The space station money is life money and it moves civilization forward.  This is a simple equation that almost anyone can figure out.  Except of course the drooling moron retired in Texas.

Amazon Shows Us Why DRM Must Go

by Editor

1984Last week, Amazon.com unwittingly dealt an enormous body blow to the concept of Digital Rights Management (DRM) by remotely deleting legally purchased copies of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four from all Kindle ebook devices.  The excellent TeleRead site devoted to all things e-book and e-reader has a very well-considered post about the dangers of DRM and how we must protect ourselves against a world where customers don’t really end up owning digital copies of things they buy online.

When Amazon can connect to your Kindle device and blow away the book you bought, it means that you never really owned it at all.  You’re a renter.  Get used to it.  Almost any online service you can think of that sells you a book or a piece of music can come into your device and zap your stuff.  They consider it their right to do so.  We need laws that make our digital purchases our very own property and forbid anyone from modifying or deleting them for any reason.

The TeleRead article draws the connection between the ability of a company like Amazon to zap books and government censorship.  Since the technology can zap books, it will zap books because governments will consider it an effective means of censorship.

Amazon Deletes Purchased Copies of ‘1984’ and ‘Animal Farm’ From Kindles

by Editor | 1 Comment

KindleWe have totally had enough of Amazon.com at Candlelight Stories and have completely removed them from advertising space on this site and permanently severed our ‘associate’ relationship with the company.  The reason is simple.  Over the weekend, Amazon went into customers’ Kindle ebook devices and deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s classic novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.  Apparently, the U.S. owner of the novels’ copyrights either decided to change its mind about offering an ebook of the novels or complained about illegal electronic copies on Amazon.  So Amazon removed them from the site and then reached out into Kindle devices that are legally owned and whose owners had legally purchased Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm from Amazon’s own site and completely removed all traces of the novels from those devises.  I call it an eBurn.

What this means is that when you buy a Kindle ebook device you don’t actually own the device or anything on it.  Amazon does.  They can simply reach into your device and destroy any file they want to at any time, without your knowledge or permission.  I call that vandalism.  I think any company behaving that way should face a class action lawsuit and be investigated for violations of law.  I will not allow Candlelight Stories to engage in any further business with such a company and cannot recommend that anyone purchase a Kindle or any electronic file from Amazon.com whatsoever.  What Amazon did was basically like this:  imagine you go to buy a book for $14.95 at a Barnes & Nobel store.  Then Barnes & Nobel decides for whatever reason that they actually didn’t really want to sell you that book.  So they send an employee into your home while you’re out to remove the book from your bookshelf and leave $14.95 under your pillow.  That’s exactly what Amazon thinks it can do to you.  Appalling.  George Orwell must at this moment be laughing in his grave.  And the joke’s on Amazon.

Amazon has gotten into the habit recently of engaging in digital censorship and then apologizing once they get wind of a public outcry.  They then try to spin their bad behavior as a technical glitch that won’t happen again.  They have replied to this latest debacle by saying that it happens ‘rarely’ and that it will not happen again.  We do not believe them.  What this episode proves beyond any shadow of doubt is that the company can press a button and blow away any book you may have purchased.  Refunding the purchases simply does not make up for this grotesque behavior.  So, when you buy a Kindle, you really don’t own anything.  You are simply renting a little portable Amazon cash register that Amazon retains full rights to.  Companies like Amazon are building distribution systems that make censorship as easy as the press of a button.  How far are we willing to go in allowing just a few companies to control the distribution of most of our literature and reference material.  If that handful of companies decides it doesn’t like the politics of a certain kind of literature, it can blow it away completely by pressing a button or entering a simple code.  Book burnings have never been able to eradicate ideas so efficiently.  We now have something new: the eBurn.  No company that cared in the slightest for literature or for books would ever behave this way for any reason.  I am disgusted and horrified by Amazon.  I actually bought a television through Amazon.  Now I’m wondering if they can get inside it and delete my favorite TV shows.  My digital camera.  Can they blow away my vacation photos?

We have an excellent open-source web browser called Firefox, we now desperately need an open-source ebook device that allows us to purchase from any bookseller in any format available.  Hey, Mozilla, are you listening?

Oh, and by the way, here’s a technology writer to stay away from.  He actually says he thinks it’s a good idea for Amazon to sneak into Kindles and destroy books: Read his dimwitted comments on nothing other than C-Net.com.

But here’s a writer who understands the problem.

Here’s a New York Times article about the eBurn.

Amazing Pictures of Space Mission to Hubble

by Editor

These are incredible, huge, and crystal clear photographs of the May 2009 shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.  The telescope is the greatest astronomical instrument ever devised and this is its last repair.  The mission was very dangerous because the Hubble orbits in an area with a high density of space junk.  A rescue mission was actually waiting on the ground with another shuttle in case the main mission ran into trouble.  These pictures are fantastic.

Apple is a Nightmare of Censorship

by Editor | 2 Comments

andasgamecensorLook at the image to the left.  If that image disturbs you to the point of banning the comic book, you are unintelligent.  No doubt about it.  It disturbs Apple so much that they’ve removed the comic book from their App Store.  Clear censorship.  The comic book is by author Cory Doctorow who has written many fiction and non-fiction books.  Most of his work supports open source creativity and remix culture.  I suspect that there’s more to Apple’s censorship of this work than meets the eye.  Apple hates open source stuff.  They lock down their products like nobody’s business.  They even think it’s illegal for you to make your own applications to load onto your own iPhone or iPod Touch.

Recent events at Apple and Amazon paint a disturbing picture of what is going on with these technology-based companies as they try to handle creative content.  It seems that the more efficiently a company designs and builds technology, the more interested they become in controlling and censoring content.  This is the fundamental core of fascism.  It is a very dangerous idea to give control of publishing and content to these companies.  It must not be allowed to happen.  They do not care one whit about freedom of expression.

What has become very obvious over the past year to any discerning observer is that Apple is a far right-wing conservative organization with truly frightening ideas of what content should be made available on a publishing platform.  Censoring the image of the Ork getting his head chopped off in a comic book is just what I would expect from an Islamic fundamentalist group or a right-wing Christian organization.  If the Taliban opened their own app store, I doubt they would publish an application that features a bikini-clad female chopping Muhammad’s head off.

So here it is –  for all intents and purposes as far as creative expression is concerned: Apple = Taliban.

I think Apple has some very smart engineers and designers working for it, but is burdened with a high-functioning nitwit at its helm: Steve Jobs.  We hear a lot about how smart this fellow is, but he appears to be about as clever as your average car salesman.  Apple needs to dump this guy quickly and figure out how to run itself as a content distributor because Mr. Jobs is not up to the job.

In the 21st Century you don’t run around censoring creative work in the United States of America.  You do that in China, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Singapore, Burma, etc.

I would suggest Mr. Jobs apply for a job in one of these places.  They would simply love to have him.

Is Apple Ready to Burn Amazon’s Kindle?

by Editor

apple_media_pad_mockupThis image is floating around the internet along with rumors that Apple is ready to unveil a much larger version of its iPod Touch that might be called MediaPad.  Apparently, it has a 6-inch HD touchscreen and will have cellular wireless connectivity.  So people are writing about this thing as a Kindle-killer.  Apple is also rumored to be preparing an ebook reader application that will allow book purchases through the iTunes store.

I think this has been coming for a while and I am almost certain that Steve Jobs will implement the first serious major competition for Amazon.